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Kiko Beats

Microlink for Screenshot - Turns any website into a screenshtot

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Take a screenshot of any website
Just enter a URL and you will receive a snapshot back, served from a global CDN.
You can consume it directly from your markup, taking advantage of the rest of Microlink API capabilities.

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Lachlan Kirkwood
Beautiful product! Delivers on everything 👍
Vlad Korobov
Amazing! How big is your team?
Kiko Beats
Maker
@vladkorobov just me and open source contributors 🙂
Kiko Beats
Maker
👋Hello, Hunters! I'm so excited to present to you Microlink screenshots, a programmatic way to take a screenshot of any website. Q: Yet another Screenshot as a service? Yes! but you will find this one is completely different. Q: Why is this different? What makes it stand out from the rest is the server-side solution: the screenshot image will be served from a CDN, being available globally and you won’t have to worry about downloading or storing it. Q: Why is this better? This allows the service to provide some extra things there, like automagically refreshing the screenshot after a time: this means the screenshot always reflects the content behind the target URL 🤯. Q: Will the screenshot be fancy? So fancy. Microlink screenshots support browser overlay (light and dark theme) and custom background color or gradient 👌. Q: How configurable is it? You can hide, click, wait or scroll to elements. Also, you can emulate a list of 71 devices. The screenshot can be full page and the output can be PNG or JPEG. Q: Can you block trackers, popups, etc? Sure, this is done by default. Q: Cookie banners as well? Yes, specially cookie banners 🙃. Q: Sounds good, but what about pricing? It starts at $0. The API has a daily rate limit; If you reach it and you need more, you can jump to a pro plan, they are intentionally cheap. Q: How can I be sure all this is true? We did a comparison table of similar services and what kind of features they offer: http://bit.ly/saasforscreenshot
Hrishikesh Pardeshi
Wow! Super cool :) Any plans of having GIF screenshots?
Kiko Beats
Maker
@hrishikesh1990 Thanks! That's a question suggested today and I started defining the shape, please take a look and feel free to comment your thoughts https://github.com/microlinkhq/o... 🙂
Francoo
@hrishikesh1990 like the idea, is it for pages with video embeded like airbnb use to have ?
Valentin D
Live screenshot? Awesome.
Kiko Beats
Maker
@valdecarpentrie Yay! The most exciting thing there, compared with browser-side solution, it's the ability to refresh the screenshot, just magic ✨
Juan Macias
Sounds good!👍 I like your q&a
Damjanski
<3
Juan J. Ramirez
No Lazy Loading. Rendering is not 100% accurate. The comparison intentionally oversees areas where other services are better, specially the ability to reproduce and render a website accurately.
Kiko Beats
Maker
@whoisjuan Partially agree with you! Try to build a service that works with any URL on the Internet as input is not a trivial thing. In order to have a quick response back, the process tries to block ads/trackers, and occasionally this caused some sites don't work as expected. Pros: It works fine 80% of time, getting the screenshot back under the 30s 🙂
Juan J. Ramirez
@kikobeats That makes sense. The reason why I mentioned it, it's because I also have one of these services and they are a pain in the ass to build (https://getscreenshot.rasterwise...)... I have nailed a lot of rendering scenarios that are hard to achieve. I can share some ideas with you if you want. Send me a PM.
Kiko Beats
Maker
@whoisjuan happy to collaborate 🙂
Kiko Beats
Maker
Just want to share a good case suggested by a user: You can convert anything you need to see into a screenshot, e.g. Google Maps URLs. https://api.microlink.io/?url=ht... 👌
Gary Privett
Its awesome, its dose what it says. And delievers everything you could ask for...
Jakov Radojevic
Hello Kiko, I tried your service, it works very nice! Congrats! :) I've been thinking to implement it in web app that I'm working on, so I was wondering if there is any way to define screen width in pixels, rather than device name? Thank You.
Kiko Beats
Maker
@jakov_radojevic We're using imagekit.io for hosting the screenshots. It's a specific CDN oriented for image supporting transformations on the fly. For example, suppose this is the URL of your screenshot https://ik.imagekit.io/microlink... We can create a thumbnail of the snapshot just adding the transformation as part of the URL https://ik.imagekit.io/microlink... All the transformations available are here: https://docs.imagekit.io/?ref=da... I understand the way the transformation should be added into the URL is not too friendly (right now, you need to modify the original URL), so I'm going to work in a more affordable way for doing that 🙂
Francoo
great explanation, congrats !
Kiko Beats
Maker
@francoolaami Thanks! a lot effort there 👏
Francoo
what about full page with scrolling ?
Kiko Beats
Maker
@francoolaami If the screenshot is full page, you don't need to scroll.
Francoo
@kikobeats i do not understand. my input => https://www.service-public.fr/ result => https://api.microlink.io?url=htt... The result is NOT the whole page with scrolling.
Kiko Beats
Maker
@francoolaami That's because you need to add `fullPage` parameter, like: https://api.microlink.io/?url=ht... You can find the list of parameters you can use with screenshot here: https://microlink.io/docs/api/ap...
Ethan
Woah, the landing page is amazing!! 😍
Kiko Beats
Maker
@booligoosh Thanks a lot for those words, the website is the part with most effort!
Ghanendra Yadav
It's Very useful for creating Infographic.
Kiko Beats
Maker
@ghanendra_yadav happy you like? Can you explain a bit your use case?
Ghanendra Yadav
@kikobeats Let's take an example of Blogger, Suppose I am a blogger and I am going to write an article about the top 10 free themes for Blogger/Wordpress. So being a blogger I know the Themes URL now I just need to paste a link and my screenshots are ready to use. Now I can add screenshots in our article. Thanks
Kiko Beats
Maker
@ghanendra_yadav it was designed exactly for that 👏
Ghanendra Yadav
@kikobeats I am Curious to use this service for my blog article. I also have a suggestion, is it possible to take bulk Screenshots or bulk URLs at a time. If it is possible then it can save a lot of time.
Ghanendra Yadav
@kikobeats I am going to rewrite my article "11 Free Resources to Practice Java Skills like a Pro" using @MiccrolinkScreenshots, Right now It has only a few Pics of the logo of websites but later it will have all 11 Pics of all sources I have written in my article.
Francoo
@kikobeats now that pupeteer is firefox ok, maybe include parameter of browser emulation : chrome or FF or safari (i see in your landing page). Today it use a chrome headless engine ? cheers !
Kiko Beats
Maker
@francoolaami that's a cool dev thing, but doing that, what is the perceptible value for the end user?
Francoo
@kikobeats if you clients are devs, today there is 3 rendering engines. Chromium (chrome + edge) ; gecko for FF and webkit for Safari. Its always nice to see the rendering on all 3 with 1 call. But i get if you are not targeting them
Kiko Beats
Maker
Microlink screenshots now support an image URL as background 🙌 ◆ Live demo: https://microlink.io/screenshot ◆ Documentation: https://microlink.io/docs/api/ap...